


Amas Veritas

by thenewgothicromance



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, M/M, Magic, Practical Magic AU, Sheriff Erik, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 14:59:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4568847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenewgothicromance/pseuds/thenewgothicromance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles and his sister Raven have been doing magic since they were children, but he doesn’t believe in using it to get out of trouble. Still, accidents happen, and when they find themselves with a dead ex-boyfriend's body on their hands, well. Desperate measures and all. To complicate matters, Tucson County Sheriff Erik Lehnsherr shows up at their door asking questions, and for some reason Charles can’t seem to lie to him.</p>
<p>(a Practical Magic AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amas Veritas

**Author's Note:**

> A big thanks goes to  endingthemes , who let me ask her opinion about this story a thousand times and helped me fix up all the mistakes, and without whom this story surely never would have been finished.
> 
> (also, the writing of this story was set to Agnes Obel's "Philharmonics" album, and i highly recommend listening to it to get the whole atmospheric experience)

_Before:_

The greenhouse is lit only by candles and the faintest glow of a crescent moon, and the clean night air wafting through the open back doors mixes with the warm scent of flowers, and herbs, and magic.

“Charles? W-what are you doing?”

Raven is rubbing her eyes with one balled up fist, and Charles smiles at her.

“A spell.”

“What kind of spell?”

Raven is still young enough that every other thing out of her mouth is a question, but Charles doesn’t really mind.

“A love spell.”

Raven’s eyes go wide, and she’s wide awake now, coming closer to look in the bowl Charles’ little hands are braced against.

“A love spell? For who?”

Charles doesn’t look back at her, but he smiles again, peering down at his notebook. His penmanship is getting better, but it’s still hard to read sometimes. He hops down from his stepping stool and brings the bowl carefully into his arms.

“A man,” he starts, and Raven is listening in rapt attention, “who’s very strong.” He plucks a petal from one of the roses that grow along the back of the greenhouse, just beyond the doors, the white ones. He lets it fall into the bowl with the other ingredients. “And has a heart that is good and kind, but he doesn’t know it.”

His small fingers find another petal. “He’s very handsome, and sometimes his eyes are blue, and sometimes they’re gray, and sometimes they’re green.” The petals rustle in the bowl of their own accord, and Charles glances down as if to say, almost, or, not just yet. His fingertips linger along the last petal as he thinks, tracing gently down the flower’s side. Atop his nightshirt rests the charm their father gave him, a silver star inside of a circle. “He’ll wear a star, like mine,” Charles adds, touching the necklace with small fingers, “and he can move things without touching them.” Raven gasps.

“He’s a witch too?”

Charles shakes his head.

“No, he just has a power, like you and me.”

“Who is he?” she asks, and Charles’ smile turns far too sad for a child so young.

“He doesn’t exist,” he says matter-of-factly, and takes the bowl to the edge of the porch. Raven sidles up beside him and they both watch the petals swirl up into the night air. “He can’t exist. And if isn’t real, I can’t fall in love with him, and he won’t die.”

“Die?” Raven ponders, her eyes rounder than the moon. “Like Daddy?” Charles nods.

“Just like Daddy.”

_And so it begins:_

There is no good reason Raven couldn’t have had her boyfriend pick her up in the morning, instead of leaving in the night like some teenage _runaway_ , but knowing Raven, the illusion is likely half the point. Charles can only sigh and fasten his bathrobe a little tighter around his waist against the chilly night air.  

“I think that’s everything,” Raven calls over her shoulder, coming back up to the porch. She turns to look at Charles with her eyes bright, and her blonde hair spilling around her face like a halo.

“Are you sure about this?” he asks her, knowing what the answer will be. Raven tilts her head and grins at him, her eyes softer than usual.

“Of course I’m sure.” She leans in like they’re sharing a secret, even though they’re the only ones there to hear it. “I’ve always hated this house, Charles. I want to go out there and _live_.”

Charles smiles a watery smile. He and Raven haven’t spent more than a day apart in…in years.

“I feel like I’m never going to see you again,” he says, struggling to make his voice lighter than he feels.

“Don’t be stupid,” Raven brushes him off. “We’re going to get old together. What’ll you bet we’ll even die on the same day?”

Charles definitely does not sniffle, even a little bit.

“You promise?”

Raven gives him a long, easy look.

“Hank, can you toss me my pocket knife?” she calls out through the gate, and the boy comes into view around the bushes, his thick glasses fogging in the misty air.

“Pocket knife?” he asks, a little startled, and Charles suppresses a laugh. This man – this boy - won’t be able to handle Raven for more than a couple weeks, he’s sure of it.

“Yeah, in the front pocket of my bag,” she says, and when he flings it through the air toward her she catches it easily. The blade flickers orange under the porch light when she snaps it open.

Quick and thoughtless, she makes a slice across the inside of her hand, and pulls Charles arm towards her to do the same to him. He flinches a little at the flash of pain but she doesn’t stop, clasping their hands together tightly, letting their blood smear together between their palms.

“Your blood,” she almost whispers, “my blood,” and Charles murmurs along with her, “our blood.”

 

Charles has to clean the windows less after Raven leaves. An occasional egg or rotten apple splatters against the panes now and then, but not with the daily occurrence they had when Raven would walk through town changing bits of her appearance one at a time as she walked. It had been a long time since he’d tried to convince her to stop. Raven’s power was, by nature, more conspicuous than his; he understood that. She was more conspicuous than he was. The point is, without Raven, children stop gathering around their front gate with their chanting about witches and things that rhyme with them.

It’s nice, to be able to work in the front gardens in the afternoons if he wants to, and the roses on the side of the house are flourishing now that he can care for them with the slow, tender hand he always allowed for the plants in the back of the house. Roses are always a bit of a hazard, though, and he scratches up the backs of his hands on the thorns.

He’s in the greenhouse mixing a spell for his cuts, talking to his wooden spoon, when he thinks of it.

In town the next day he finds an open shop for rent on D Street, makes a deal with the realtor before the sky even goes dark.

The shelves in _Serenity_ are stocked with natural remedies, mostly homemade oatmeal soaps and mint teas, and hardly any of it’s magical at all. That doesn’t seem to matter to his customers.

Charles still is – and always will be – a witch to these people, it’s not that they forget that so much as they stop caring.  For the most part Charles tries to keep the magic _out_ of his work; it isn’t as if the garden doesn’t provide enough for him to work with on its own. But the more people come into the shop, the more people ask, in hushed voices, if Charles will tell their future or give them a little something for luck. Charles even takes to wearing the pentagram from his childhood above his shirt, and his customers eye it with a certain thrill when they ask him for a little something extra.

It quickly becomes necessary for Charles to hire some help. He finds Moira first, one of his best customers, who sells apples in the Saturday market, in a stall on B Street. When she comes in for the interview she brings him a fresh apple pie – she’s been promising him one for weeks, in exchange for his soap recipe – and he swears it has nothing to do with why he hires her.

After Moira, Sean wanders in, having seen the hiring sign in the window, never having stepped foot in the shop before. Charles hires him anyway.

Sean isn’t good for much besides restocking shelves and ringing customers up at the counter, but Moira learns the store well, learns how to give people advice and help them find what they’re looking for. With the both of them around, Charles is free to take customers into the tiny back room and read palms and tea leaves, deliver small spells to help someone’s tomatoes produce better fruit, to help someone cook the perfect meatloaf.

Cautious as he is with his given power, Charles begins skimming the minds of his customers and lending a helping hand when he can, although unasked, sending a little peace to troubled minds, those who need better sleep or a bit of unspoken comfort. It’s a small thing, but Charles has never used his power so much before, and never felt so good about it.

 

He doesn’t see Raven for three years, although they trade letters back and forth monthly, at least. Hers come to him postmarked from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and it brings a smile to Charles’ face, knowing she’s living the way she always wanted.

Raven never calls him, absolutely never. He hasn’t heard her voice since she’s been gone, and yet one Saturday morning the telephone rings.

“Raven? Is that you?” he says, with a feeling about it under his skin.

“Charles,” she says softly, and Raven has never spoken softly in her life. “Charles, I’m in a really bad place.”

Charles’ body goes cold, all the way through.

“What is it? Are you alright?”

Over the telephone line Charles can hear her breath shake, and he’s pulling his car keys from the hook by the door even before she says it.

“Do you think – do you think you could come get me? I’m not that far.”

Charles drives all afternoon and all night along the 101, and finds the Motel 6 in Eureka a little after midnight. He never has to ask Raven for directions, knowing every turn to take as it comes, and with the light sting across his right hand he can hear Raven in his head, three years ago, saying, “Our blood.” He’ll always know where to find her.

Raven is sitting in the parking lot with makeup running down her face and a purple bruise flush around her eye.

“Let’s go, let’s go, he’s passed out,” she whispers when Charles get out of the car.

“Who’s passed out?” he says, and she shushes him.

“Azazel. Come on, let’s go.”

Raven’s letters had talked about this, “Azazel,” the handsome Russian man she met in Arizona, and Charles had always thought he sounded like bad news, but he thought most of the things Raven did sounded like bad news, and hadn’t said anything.

“Did he…did he do this to you?” he whispers, fingers come up to brush his sister’s black eye. Raven bites her lip and looks away. Charles grits his teeth.

“Well, come on then.”

They’ve almost left the parking lot when Raven shouts, “Wait!” and nearly gives Charles a heart attack.

“What? What is it?”

“My pocketknife,” she says, “I don’t have it!” and Charles rolls his eyes.

“Raven we can get you another pocketknife,” he says, and his foot is almost back to the gas pedal when she puts a hand on his arm to stop him.

“No that one’s special, I have to get it.”

She’s out of the car before Charles can argue with her, creeping over to another car in the parking lot.  Charles has little choice but to follow her.

The car she’s leaning into is old, but well kept, a classic Charles is sure, and there’s a man passed out in the driver’s seat. It must be Azazel.

“Raven what are you doing?” he hisses, as she leans through the window, over Azazel, to fish around in a bag on the passenger seat.

She glares at him and leans in a bit further, and Charles keeps his eyes glued to Azazel.  He does look like he’s out for the count, head lolling back onto headrest, but he looks dangerous; there are scars running across his face, crisscrossing in different directions, and in the light from the motel sign his skin looks red.

Raven waves her hand at him and Charles moves his gaze to her, holding the pocketknife, mouthing, “I’ve got it!”

She’s backing out of the window when Azazel jerks awake and grabs her around the waist.

Charles is there in an instant, ready to reach in the car and, well, he isn’t sure what he would have done then, but it doesn’t matter. Azazel has already wrestled the knife from Raven’s fist and flicked it open, holding it close against her throat.

“Get in the car,” he tells Charles, “and drive.” Charles panics.

Azazel’s hand falls and he slumps over, his dead weight falling across Raven’s shoulders and she scrambles out from under him, out of the car.  Charles wraps his arms around her and they stare at the man lying limp in the passenger seat.

“Did he pass out?” Raven whispers, and Charles swallows.

“I may have,” he starts, swallowing the vomit rising in his throat. “I think he might be dead.”

“Charles!” Raven shrieks, pushing him away. Charles stumbles backwards.

“What was I supposed to do? He was going to kill you!” He says as loudly as he dares.

“You could have knocked him out,” Raven shouts, and Charles sends an uneasy glance back at the motel.

“Look, I panicked, alright? I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Raven won’t look at him, and she’s quiet for a long time before she says, “Well let’s get him in your car.”

“In my car?” Charles repeats warily. “Why?”

“We can’t just leave him here!” she says, and Charles supposes it’s true, although he’d like to. It would be almost too easy to get away with it, he thinks. There isn’t even a murder weapon. He’s the murder weapon. He has to gulp down the urge to puke again before he can help Raven drag the limp body out of the car.

They drive back in the quickly fading darkness, and pull into the driveway while the rest of the town is still at Sunday service. They bury Azazel underneath the roses, just outside the kitchen window, and sit at the table with muddy hands and silence.  

He’s been in the ground less than an hour when Raven says, “We’ve got to bring him back.” Charles stares at her.

“Bring him back? What – even if we could – “

“You shut him down,” Raven says, her jaw locked and her eyes bright. Charles flinches. “You can bring him back.”

“That’s not how it works Raven, I’m not even sure how I shut him down in the first place.”

That should be the end of it, but nothing is ever over with Raven until she gets her way.

“There’s a book,” she says, and disappears into the greenhouse. Charles can hear her rummaging around, and he doesn’t like where this is going.

The book she thumps down on the table in front of him is the spell book they used as children, under strict warning of their mother that they were only to perform spells they’d been instructed to learn. Charles has broken that rule only once, just after their mother married Kurt. A love spell, he knows, although he can’t remember what he put into it.

Raven ruffles through the pages, thin as leaves under her fingers, and Charles resists the urge to tell her to be careful not to tear them.

“Here,” she says, stabbing her finger at a page much farther in the back than Charles had ever dared look. Charles reads the spell with the black hole of dread in his stomach growing larger by the second.

“We can’t do this, Raven, that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t – it doesn’t work. He won’t come back as himself.”

“Good,” she says. “I don’t want him as himself anyway.”

Charles wants to argue, you can’t just mess with people’s lives like this, but then, he got them into this mess in the first place. If Raven wants to try clean it up he’s got to help her.

“It has to be done at night,” he says, closing his eyes. He doesn’t miss Raven’s smile.

 

They leave the greenhouse doors open when they drag the body in, keeping the smell from stifling them in the kitchen. As it is they’re both gagging from it as they heave the dead weight onto the kitchen table.

“This is disgusting,” Charles mutters under his breath, and Raven hands him the book.

“We need something to draw this symbol on his chest,” he says, pointing at one of the pages, and scans the rest of the spell while Raven searches the kitchen.

She presses a can of whipped cream into Charles’ waiting hand and he gives her a long look.

“All I could find,” she shrugs, and Charles sighs, shaking the can.

“Needles, we need needles,” he says after, “and get some sage burning in here, I don’t want him hanging around.”

It’s been years since Charles had done anything like this, and it settles some kind of ease into Charles’ bones, feeling the magic thick in the air around him after so long. He pulls his pendant out from under his shirt and rubs his fingers around the tarnished circle.

“Okay, we need to poke the needles in his eyes,” he says, clipped and even, as Raven shudders. He pulls back an eyelid and his chest heaves.

“Alright, alright, we can do this,” he whispers, closing his eyes, taking a needle for himself while Raven takes the other. “We have to say the words together, okay?” They both glance back at the book.

“Black as night,” Raven mutters, and Charles nods, “Erase death from our sight.”

“White as light,” Charles picks up, “Hecate make it right.” With his free hand he reaches for Raven. Fingers linked over the body, their voices, so different, almost sound like one.

_“Black as night_

_Erase death from our sight_

_White as light_

_Hecate make it right.”_

The kitchen lights flicker and go out, and neither of them hesitates to plunge their needle into the corpse’s eyes.  In the dark room there are three gasps.

Charles fumbles for the curtains, pulling them back to cast the room in the soft, white glow of the moon. The corpse is sitting up straight.

“Azazel?” Raven whispers, and he turns, recognizing his name. He doesn’t answer, but swings his legs off the table in heavy, awkward movements. They really didn’t think this through.

Raven backs up a little, but the corpse’s hands close around her neck before she has the chance.

“Wait, wait, Azazel, look –“

Again, Charles panics.

“Dammit Charles, we could have gotten control of him,” Raven gripes, and both of them keep their eyes glued to the body lying on their kitchen floor. “We have to try again.” Charles shakes his head.

“No, no we are definitely not trying again. I don’t know what we brought back, but it was not a person.”

They bury him in the same place, under the roses, and they can hardly see each other’s faces in the shadows.

“Raven,” Charles says quietly, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t – I couldn’t control it.”

She sits back on her heels and sizes him up.

“Maybe you should work on that, Charles. You need more practice with your power.”

Charles takes his next breath too fast, and the chilly air is sharp his lungs.

“No, no more practice,” he says firmly. “No more power. Ever.”

****  


Charles has work in the morning, and he wakes up early. Staring up at the rafter above his bed, the same ones he’s woken up to every morning in his life, he wants to pretend it’s a dream. A terrible, nasty dream.

When he looks out the kitchen window, though, he can see that it’s rained, and Azazel’s boots are poking up through the wet grass.

“Shit.”

Knees covered in mud he shows up to the shop, and when Moira gives him a worried look he smiles weakly.

“Had a bit of spill on my way out the gate,” he offers, and she shakes her head at him, smiling.

Charles is on edge all day, jumps each time the door opens, everything he mixes comes out an odd brown, as if even the plants can feel his guilt.

“You look like you need a day off, boss,” Sean tells him when they’re closing up. “Moira and I can keep shop for a day, huh Moira?” and she nods.

“He’s right Charles. Go home, sleep in. We can handle things here.”

It isn’t as simple as that, Charles knows. This isn’t something he can go sleep off, that will disappear overnight. No matter how many nights pass that body will still be buried in the backyard, and no matter how many hours Charles sleeps he’ll still have killed a man.

Still, Charles didn’t sleep much last night, and a day off to make sure the roses cover the shallow grave well enough won’t hurt.

    On his way through the kitchen the broom they keep in the corner clatters to the floor and he frowns at it.

“Company’s coming,” he mutters to himself, but doesn’t linger on it.

He goes to bed early without even speaking to Raven - doubtful that she’d want to speak with him in any case – and closes his curtains against the still fading light.

 

Sleeping in, however nice it had sounded, doesn’t happen. Charles is woken by the sound of the doorbell, and he doesn’t bother hoping Raven will get it, as he can still hear her snoring down the hall.

Charles wraps himself in a sweater and thumps down the stair with no small amount of grumbling. It’s not as if they get visitors often, and of course it’s on the one day he’s trying to sleep in…

The figure outside the door is tall, probably a man, Charles can tell that much. He spares a glance out the kitchen window to make sure there aren’t boots popping up through the grass before yanking the door open.

“Hello?”

It is indeed a tall man, with the first few buttons of his shirt collar popped open and still suffering in the heavy, wet morning judging by the way he pulls at it. Charles spares a glance at the sky. There’s a storm coming. The man smiles.

“I’m looking for a Miss Raven Darkholme?”

 If this is another one of Raven’s ex-boyfriends, he swears he’s never letting her go on a date again – although he will say, this one is considerably better looking than the last one was, even before he was dead.

“I’m her brother,” he says evenly, blinking the haze from his eyes. “Can I ask what you need her for?”

The man’s jacket is brown leather, and he digs around in an inside pocket, coming out with a creased picture.

“I’m looking for this man, and last I heard your sister might know where I can find him.”

The man in the picture is smiling, and the lighting is better, but there’s no doubt it’s Azazel.  Charles is about to slam the door in the man’s face when he digs in the pocket again and pulls out the glimmering telltale star of a sheriff’s badge. The ID says Arizona PD. Charles isn’t sure how he keeps from throwing up.

“I’ll just go and get her,” he says quickly, “Why don’t you come in?”

 

He leaves the sheriff wandering around their kitchen and dashes upstairs to Raven’s room.

She’s woken up now, sitting on her floor crossed-legged like she’s meditating. Her hair is noticeably shorter and redder than it was last night, and Charles thinks one of her eyes may be a different color. She jumps when he bursts in.

“Jesus Charles, haven’t you heard of knocking? What the –“

“There is a cop downstairs and he’s asking about Azazel, he’s come all the way from Arizona, and he wants to talk to you,” Charles hisses, and bites his lip. “And I – I don’t think I can lie to him.” Charles isn’t sure why he says it except that it seems true somehow, he doesn’t think he can lie to the sheriff.

Raven stares at him.

“What do you mean? Of course you can lie to him!” she says, holding Charles’ shoulders in her firm grip. “Look, it’s simple as this. We’ll tell him Azazel hit me, so I left him, and we haven’t seen him since. It’s that easy!”

Charles nods quickly, and he knows she’s right, this guy can’t possibly know anything. He’s heading for the stairs when Raven stops him.

“Charles!” He looks back to see her rifling through her dresser. “Is he cute?” Charles blushes.

“Well, I mean, you know. For a cop, I mean.” He sighs. “Yes.”

Back downstairs Charles nearly has his eleventh heart attack this week when the sheriff isn’t in the kitchen. He’s about to call Raven – he can’t deal with this – when he spots him in the greenhouse. Charles must have left the doors open.

The sheriff is holding a jar up to the light, peering into it like he thinks it might be drugs. Charles creeps up to the doorframe.

“It’s just herbs,” he says quietly, trying to keep the nerves from shaking his voice. The man starts and puts the jar down quickly.

“You have quite the collection, Mr. Darkholme.”

“Xavier,” Charles corrects him. “Mr. Xavier.” The sheriff gives him a long, puzzled look. “It’s a long story.”

“It seems I’ve got time,” the sheriff says, glancing pointedly back to the house where Raven still hasn’t come down the stairs.

“So what brings you here?” Charles says instead of answering, crossing his arms. The sheriff goes back to that jacket pocket – and how many things does he have crammed in there, honestly – and pulls out an envelope. A very familiar envelope.

“That’s one of my letters,” Charles says, too loud, and the sheriff, stepping back into the kitchen, at least has the decency to look a little humbled.

“It is.”

Charles doesn’t know what’s in this particular letter, but he knows it wasn’t for anyone but Raven to see - and if he’d mentioned his powers...what then?

“That was a very personal letter,” he says, lowering his voice. The sheriff nods, but doesn’t give anything away.

“It was.”

Raven comes flouncing down the staircase then, swinging around the end of the bannister.

“Hello,” she sing-songs, “you must be officer…?”

The sheriff glances up at her.

“Erik Lehnsherr.”

Raven leans in close to him over the counter, and she’s wearing some sleeveless dress with lace around the top, and Charles can’t look.

“So what can I help you with, Officer Lehnsherr?”

Sheriff Lehnsherr glances at Raven, and then at Charles, who turns quickly to the sink, cleaning up some of the dishes he’d left last night. His fingers shake around the edges of the plate in his hands.

“Miss Darkholme,” Lehnsherr says, and his badge says he’s from Arizona, but the way his tongue twists around his words says otherwise. He takes out the picture again. “Do you know where this man is?”

Charles turns around in time to see Raven looked shocked, and he’s impressed with her really, it looks genuine.

“Azazel? No, I have no idea, Officer.”

Lehnsherr gives her a long, hard look.

“He is your boyfriend, if I’m not mistaken? I found your things in his motel room.

“He _was_ my boyfriend,” she says, averting her gaze, turning her head just so that her black eye is most obvious. Charles’ stomach still churns to see it.

“And is that his handiwork, there?” Lehnsherr asks. Raven nods and glances up at him through her eyelashes.

“He gave me this, and I left him,” she says. “A man hits me, he only does it once.” Lehnsherr nods.

“And, when was this?”

“About,” she makes a show of thinking, “two days ago?” She looks at Charles. “Right Charles, about two days ago?” Charles’ eyes go wide.

“Hm? Yeah, oh. Yeah, about two days, that’s right.”

Lehnsherr glances between them, his eyes catching somewhere near Charles. He moves around the counter.

“Charles,” he says, with too much emphasis, “whose car keys, are these?”

He picks the set of keys - _Azazel’s keys_ \- up from the counter, and when had Charles put those there? Or had Raven? Why wasn't it buried it with the rest of him?

Raven comes to his rescue.

“Those are my keys, Officer.”

He looks at them a little closer and thumbs through the keychains, stopping on one and letting it dangle through his fingers. A strip of leather with an unmistakable “A” imprinted in the middle. He doesn’t have to say what they’re all thinking.

“We have his keys,” Charles blurts out, “and they’re not ours. And that is a crime, I know that.” What is he saying? “We couldn’t just - he might’ve - he was going to drive off with her!” he says, and Raven stares at him. Lehnsherr pulls his head back, and then leans in again.

“He was going to drive off with her?”

“No, not - I mean,” Charles stutters, and why can’t he just lie? “There was a car, and those keys, and we were just trying to get out of there, but we would love to give him back these keys if you find him.”

Charles’ face must be fire engine red, and the sheriff keeps staring at him.

“So you’re telling me you two have no idea where this man is?”

Charles keeps his mouth firmly closed, biting his bottom lip to keep the truth from spilling out.

“Mmm, m-mm.”

Lehnsherr nods, and leans in too close. Close enough that Charles can breathe in the sharp smell of him, and see the every speck of blue in his steely gray eyes.

“You don’t mind if I take a look around, then?” Charles shakes his head.

“No, not at all.”

The moment Lehnsherr is out of sight Raven whirls on him, mouthing furiously, _What are you doing?_

Normally Charles might send his answer back in her head, but that isn’t something he’s doing anymore, he reminds himself. No more powers.

Instead he mouths back, _I don’t know!_ and he’s never been more honest in his life.

The sheriff doesn’t take long, and apparently doesn’t find anything worthy of his interest before he meets them back in the kitchen.

“I’m not going to beat around the bush here,” he says, pulling a few more papers from his jacket, the outside pocket this time, and laying them on the table. “The man I’m looking for - your...friend - is wanted by the state of Arizona for the murder of this woman.”

It’s another picture, a blurry crime scene photo taken out on a desert highway. He flips it over to reveal another, smaller picture taped to the back.

“We found this mark branded into her skin,” he says, and to Charles’ ever increasing alarm, Raven nods.

“That’s his ring alright. That’s Azazel’s ring.”

All Charles can think after is, _That could have been you_ , but he keeps the thought safe in his own head, where it belongs.

  
  
Despite himself, Charles goes into work on Tuesday with his chest feeling light. A little work, he thinks, will do him good.

In the shop, the weight of Azazel’s death doesn’t hang over him, isn’t in the air and on his tongue when he breathes.   _Serenity_ lives up to its name all morning, for it’s owner at least.

“It looks like the time off did you good,” Moira says, and Charles returns her smile without having to try.

“I’ll go pick us up some lunch,” he says during the afternoon lull, and the late summer air feels so clean in his lungs.

He comes back to see Sheriff Lehnsherr in his shop.

 

Moira is restocking shelves and the sheriff is leaning in close, speaking to her in a low voice. Charles leaves the bag of sandwiches behind the counter.

He hides in the backroom for a few minutes, stalling, making a cup of tea and desperately hoping the sheriff will be gone when he comes back. He has no such luck.

Whatever they’re talking about Moira seems to be very intent, Charles can hear the tone of her voice even if he can’t make out the words, solid and earnest. He resists the urge to skim her thoughts and instead turns his attention to wrapping up customers’ orders.  

As he’s finishing he hears Moira say, “He isn’t – he’s definitely not into anything like that,” and jerks his head up to find Lehnsherr staring at him. No, not at him, at the spoon still stirring his tea even though both of Charles’ hands are busy. He flushes and sends it a look, and the spoon clatters to halt. Lehnsherr smiles at Moira and thanks her for her time.

“Sean, could you finish this for me?” Charles says quickly, and Sean steps up behind the counter but he and Moira and the customer all have their eyes glued to Charles as he runs out the door and after the sheriff.

“I’m sorry,” he calls ahead, and Sheriff Lehnsherr stops, turns to face him. “Am I under some sort of surveillance?” Lehnsherr looks at him long and easy.

“Should you be?”

Charles jaw tightens against the urge to say _yes, yes, guilty_ , and he crosses his arms.

“If there’s something you want to know, Sheriff, ask me.”

Lehnsherr shakes his head and when he laughs it’s empty.

“I tried that, Mr. Xavier, and all I know is there is definitely something missing from your stories.”

Charles is trying to figure out how to argue past the lump in his throat that’s dying to tell him exactly what’s missing when he adds, “Look, I would like to talk with you again, but I have to finish up some…homework…around here first. I could drop by tomorrow morning, though.”

Charles nods.

“Fine.”

Lehnsherr looks out into the street before he meets Charles’ eyes again, and the last time they talked Charles could have sworn his eyes were gray, but he finds they’re actually an icy blue.

“It’s a date, then,” Lehnsherr says, and Charles makes a rather undignified sound in his throat a that. For some reason it makes the sheriff smile before he turns and walks away.

 

“The sheriff’s going to be here tomorrow morning,” Charles tells Raven when he gets home, and he clamps down on the feeling of her attention sharpening.

“Why? He already talked to us.”

Charles sighs.

“Well we weren’t exactly very convincing, were we?”

Raven stands up from the table where she’s been reading…a spell book?

“Are you practicing magic again?” Charles asks, and Raven waves him away and tips the book closed.

“Just thought I’d brush up on the basics.” She folds her arms. “I think what you mean is that you weren’t very convincing, and I agree, it’s a problem.”

She’s right, and a stab of irritation cuts through Charles at it, he knows he’s practically giving them away every time the sheriff is anywhere within earshot, but he can’t stop himself.

“I don’t think I’m the only one,” he says out of sheer spite, and the words of tumbling out of his mouth. “Your flirting with him wasn’t exactly subtle, you know, and I don’t think the innocent suspects tend to jump straight to the ‘charm your way out of trouble’ tactic.”

It’s stupid, and Raven jerks her head back, looking at him too closely. Charles only just stops himself from fidgeting under her gaze.

“Are you… _jealous_?” she says, and her voice is so full of disbelief that Charles doesn’t even consider.

“Of course not, that’s ridiculous,” he mutters, crossing and uncrossing his arms. He doesn’t need to read her mind to know Raven doesn’t believe him for a second. She shakes her head and disappears up the stairs.

A frustrated scream rises in Charles’ chest, pushing at his ribs and his lungs and taking up all his air, but he slams his mouth shut and doesn’t let out a sound.

Wandering to the table he flips through the book Raven left there, and it isn’t exactly the sort of book that covers “the basics.” It’s one of their mother’s more advanced spell books, actually, the pages well worn but kept in carefully good condition. If Raven was looking through this she must have been looking for something specific – something she, apparently, doesn’t want Charles to know about.  Charles could snap his fingers and the book would open to the last page it had been on, it would be that easy, but he’s sick of knowing things people don’t mean him to.

 

All his life Charles has preferred sleeping in the far upstairs. What had once been little more than a loft was long since converted into two bedrooms – one for Charles and one for Raven – with a little hallway in between.  After Kurt and Sharon died, Charles certainly could have moved downstairs, into their much bigger bedroom. The choice was first his – he was the oldest after all – and then Raven’s. Neither of them chose to leave the attic.

Three floors up like this, even the slightest wind makes the walls and floors around him creak as he goes to sleep at night, but it isn’t a bother. In fact, Charles isn’t sure he could sleep without it. This sound is different.

It’s footsteps, in the hall, another sound Charles knows well, but these are not the ones he’s so familiar with. These are much louder, falling much harder on the floorboards than Raven’s bare feet do when she goes to the bathroom in the night, or to get a glass of water from the kitchen. It’s the sound of boots, very much like the ones that refuse to stay buried in the garden. Charles’ heart jumps in his throat.

_It’s just your imagination_ , he tells himself, but his whole life Charles has been raised knowing thing that most people think must be imagination, are in fact, very real. It doesn’t help him sleep a bit.

****  


Raven is already up when Charles opens his eyes; he can smell pancakes burning.

“You’re making breakfast?” he asks blearily, coming into the kitchen, and Raven beams at him from over the stovetop.

“More like destroying it,” she says cheerfully. “You want to take over?”

Charles gladly takes the spatula and scrapes the burned pancakes into the trash, pouring a new batch into the pan.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the effort,” he says, “but you’re not usually even awake for breakfast. What’s the occasion?”

Raven shrugs.

“I figured inviting Sheriff Lehnsherr to breakfast couldn’t hurt his opinion of us any.”

“Shit.” Charles glances at the clock – half past nine already. “I forgot about that.”

Pulling three plates from the drying rack he hands them to Raven and turns the heat up under the pancakes just a touch.

“Could you go set the table? The one in the garden?” he asks her, and Raven takes the plates but doesn’t make a move to leave.

“You want to have the sheriff eat with us in the _garden_? Where the _body_ is?”

Charles frowns.

“They’re on opposite sides of the house,” he argues, “and besides that, I don’t want him finding any more evidence in the _house_ , like last time.”

Thankfully Raven doesn’t push it, but she stops at the backdoor to pick up the dish of syrup sitting on the counter. She must have poured it before Charles came down, and that, at least, she hadn’t ruined. Charles turns his head to make sure she doesn’t need any help, is going to ask if she needs a tray to carry everything, but he stops.

“Raven, stop,” he says, and she freezes with her hand on the door handle.

Through the molted glass of the door there is shadow standing just underneath the roses, and Charles can just make out dark, slicked back hair and heavy, pointed boots. He knows what those boots sound like on their floor at night.

“What, Charles?” Raven asks impatiently, following his gaze out the door.

“You don’t –“ he starts, and stops himself, because it’s clear she doesn’t see him. He tries to smile. “Why don’t you let me set the table,” he says, “and I’ll check on the roses while I’m at it.” She knows what he means; he can see it in the careful look on her face. “Just flip the pancakes when they’re not runny on the bottom anymore.”

The garden is empty of course, but for the frogs that suddenly seem to be hopping all across the grass. Charles tears at the tangles of roses that have grown out of control with his neglect of them, but there are no shoes – nor anything else – popping up through the soil.

 

He comes back into the kitchen to find Raven’s wandered off, leaving a small stack of pancakes on a covered plate by the stove. Charles peeks underneath to see that none of them are burned at all. He wonders, briefly, if she used magic to do it.

There’s a clattering from behind him, in the greenhouse, and he whirls around to see Sheriff Lehnsherr poking around his plants again. The clock reads five past ten. Raven must have let him in.

It’s a replay of their first conversation. Charles leans against the doorway.

“Belladonna,” he says, nodding to the jar in the sheriff’s hands. “It’s a sedative. People put in their tea to relax, calm their nerves.”

Lehnsherr puts the jar down and glances up at Charles.

“ _Some_ people use it as a poison,” he says pointedly. Charles cocks an eyebrow.

“Which people?”

Lehnsherr nods.

“ _Witch_ people.”

Charles can’t help but grin, and steps into the greenhouse, right into the sheriff’s space.

“Mmm, witches,” he says slowly. “Looks like you found me out, huh?”

Lehnsherr doesn’t take his eyes off Charles, doesn’t back away, around the table.

“Looks like I did.”

“Are you going to arrest me on account of witchcraft?” Charles teases. “Tie me to a stake in the town square?” Lehnsherr laughs ruefully, shakes his head.

“Do you have any idea what kinds of crazy things I’ve heard about you?” He tries to smile, but can’t hide the plain confusion in his face. “I’ve got people telling me you’re up here cooking up all kinds of magic potions, that you’re into devil worship –“

Charles shakes his head.

“We don’t do any kind of devil worship, I promise you that. Just stories they tell to frighten the children.”

Lehnsherr stares at him, challenging him to counter the magic potions part. When Charles doesn’t, he says, “So what is it that you do, then?” Charles smiles again.

“What do I do?” he hums, and makes a show of thinking. “I make soap, mostly. Tea, hand lotions. But you know that, you visited my shop.” He pauses, and takes a deep breath. “Magic isn’t just…spells, and potions.

“Your badge,” he says, reaching for the endless front pocket of Lehnsherr’s jacket, until he takes the badge out and lets Charles hold it, watching him carefully. “It’s just a star,” Charles tells him, flipping it open, and pulls his necklace out from under his shirt. “Just like mine. Just a symbol. Your talisman.” He looks up to meet the sheriff’s eyes. “It can’t stop criminals in their tracks.” They both look at the badge like it might prove him wrong, like it might tell Lehnsherr the truth about Charles at any moment. “It only has power because you believe it does.”

They’re close enough now, Charles realizes, that he can hear the sheriff’s slow breathing, can see that his eyes are in fact gray, after all. He steps back, and makes to turn around. “Maybe,” he says on impulse, “you could learn to believe in me.”

In the doorway back to the kitchen the sheriff stops him with a steady voice.

“Mr. Xavier.” Charles turns. “Are you hiding your sister’s boyfriend?”

Charles shakes his head slowly.

“Not in this house.”

Lehnsherr doesn’t falter.

“Did you or your sister kill him?”

Charles smirks.

“Oh yeah, a couple of times.”

Across the kitchen Raven is back at the counter, picking up the pancakes; she looks up with suspiciously bright eyes and a smile.

“Morning Erik – I can call you Erik, can’t I?” she says as Lehnsherr trails in from the greenhouse. The sheriff – _Erik_ – almost laughs.

“Why not.”

Raven turns to Charles with a sudden, sharp look, but her voice is easy and sweet.

“Charles, where is the syrup?”

It takes a moment for Charles to think about it, he’d been so anxious to check under the roses when he’d set the table.

“It’s already outside,” he says, and her eyes go wide.

“That’s, um –“ she glances at Erik and thrusts the plate of pancakes into Charles’ hands, dashing outside.

“What…” Charles says, watching her run to the table through the window, as the back door slams into its frame. “What is she doing?”

“Your sister is certainly,” Erik says, and hesitates. “An interesting young lady. She invited me to breakfast.”

“I suppose you’d better stay, then,” Charles says simply, and knows Erik will.

Raven comes back in with the syrup dish and pours all of its contents down the sink.

“I just remembered,” she chatters, breathless, “I accidentally put salt in the syrup instead of sugar.” She laughs nervously. “Wouldn’t want to have eaten that.”

There’s an uncomfortable pause, but Erik chuckles politely, so Charles does the same. As they carry everything into the garden he hisses, “What were you doing?” to Raven but she just smiles at him and all but skips on ahead.

“So Erik, you’ve heard all about what we do up here?” she teases as they eat. “Turning people into newts and all.”  Erik smiles, and sends Charles a heavy look.

“That I have.”

“You ever do anything like that?” she says, and Erik stills.

“Turn people into newts?” he says lightly, but he’s stopped eating. Charles puts down his fork.

Raven shrugs, and looks down at her plate. “Or you know, something. Done a little magic, moved things without touching them?”

Charles actually laughs.

“Raven, that’s – what a silly question to ask a guest.”

But Erik, beside him, has gone cold.

“I need to leave,” he says, rattling the table when he stands up. “I still need to ask you a few questions, Charles, but not – I have to go.”

He crosses the lawn so fast he nearly steps on a few of the frogs that seemed to have made the garden their home overnight, and Charles watches him go with no small amount of shock.

“I didn’t think it was really the season for frogs, anymore,” Raven says idly, and Charles turns to her.

“What – what was that?”

She shrugs.

“Pretty strange, wasn’t it? I was just kidding around.”

She gathers the dishes and carries them to the kitchen on her own, and Charles finds himself stuck in his place, replaying Raven’s words.

_Move things without touching them_ , he thinks. _Strange_.

****  
  


He closes up the shop late that night, and walks home in the fading twilight. Just past the front gate he stops to break off a few sprigs of the rosemary that grows there. _Protection from strangers._  He pockets it to keep in his bedroom at night. When he looks up there’s a tall shadow on the porch.

A rush of adrenaline surges into his blood, but as the shadow paces underneath the porch light he can see it isn’t Azazel at all, but Erik.

“Can I help you with something, Sheriff?” he says, coming up the steps.

“Erik, just…Erik’s fine.”

Charles pauses his efforts in jamming his key in the rusty lock to look over at him, and Erik sighs, leaning on the porch railing, looking out into the dark garden.

“It’s…I’m not here on business.”

Charles can’t help but smile.

“Erik, then,” he says, and suddenly the lock clicks open. Erik is standing behind him, looking hopeful.

“If it’s not business, what can I help you with, Erik?” Charles asks, leading them into the kitchen

“I wanted to apologize, for earlier,” he says, haltingly, trailing after Charles through the house.

The both stop in front of the back door to look into the backyard where they can see Raven sitting in a ring of candles.

“What is she _doing_?” Charles mutters, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Erik insists, and the use of his first name draws Charles’ attention. “The way I acted at breakfast, I…I know your sister didn’t mean anything by it, I just…”

“You didn’t like being accused of witchcraft?” Charles says pointedly, trying to keep a straight face.

“That’s not – I didn’t –“ Charles stops Erik with a sturdy hand on his arm and mischief in his eyes. He tilts his towards the door.

“Would you like to try some magic, Erik?”

Light from the house spills into the backyard when they open the door, but Raven doesn’t look up until they’re standing at the edge of her circle.

“What are you doing, Raven?” Charles asks cheerfully, and she doesn’t look surprised in the least to see Erik with him.  In fact, she smiles big, the way she does when she has good secrets, the kind she loves to keep.

“It’s the equinox, Charles,” she says obviously. “You didn’t remember?”

He laughs.

“Somehow it had slipped my mind.”

She gets up from the circle and balances herself on Charles’ shoulder as she steps out from the candles.

“Some witch you are,” she says, shoving at him lightly, and makes her way back to the house. The kitchen lights flicker off as she goes, although Charles can’t help but think she’s never gone to bed this early in her life.

“Is this some kind of…” Erik starts, and Charles finishes for him.

“Ritual?”

“I was going to say celebration.”

Charles shrugs and steps into the circle himself, the candles creating a bubble of light around them as Erik follows, a changing balance of soft glow and shadows.

“We’ve never done this before, I don’t what she’s onto.”

Erik tilts his head back to look at the sky, and then back down to Charles.

“I can tell you two are close, but, if you don’t mind my saying, you don’t seem to know very much about your own sister.”

“Know,” Charles repeats easily, “I know plenty, but that’s not the same as understanding, is it?” He twists a blade of grass in his fingers, watches it spin. “She’s been acting a little…strange…today.”

They both lean back at the same time to look up at the stars, thick and bright in the sky. Charles doesn’t even spare a glance towards the roses.

“Did you really come out here just to apologize?” he asks. Erik sighs.

“No, I wanted to explain.”

Charles slides his eyes to Erik’s face, the twist in his forehead like he’s got secrets of his own to carry.

“You’ve yet to do that,” he says and smiles. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

It pulls a corner of Erik’s mouth up a little, and he spends a time staring at the candles around them, not meeting Charles’ eyes, not even when he talks.

“Do you really do magic, Charles?” he asks, keeping his voice quiet, like he’s embarrassed to even say it aloud. Of all the people who have thought one thing or another about Charles and his family, no one has asked him this.

“Would you believe me if I said yes?”

Erik nods before he says, “Could you show me?”

“My mother always used to say, ‘Magic isn’t a party trick to disprove the non-believers,’” Charles says, standing up. He whispers a few words under his breath at the edge of the circle, and as they both watch the candles around them float into the air. “But then, my mother said a great many things we never really account for.”

“Your mother taught you, then?” Erik asks, his gaze fixed on the candles.

“Before my father died, yes,” Charles says, and it finally brings Erik’s gaze to him. He doesn’t have to ask for Charles to know he wants to; everyone does. “There’s a curse on our family it seems,” he says. “Any man in love with an Xavier is bound to die sooner than later.”

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Erik mutters, and Charles shakes his head.

“It’s alright.”

“I’m not – “ Erik starts to say, and for a moment Charles thinks he’ll say, _I’m not afraid of being cursed_ , and in the soft shadows of the candles he can admit that it’s what he wants to hear. He stops, though, shaking his head, and Charles sits back down beside him, letting the candles float as they will.

“You said magic is more than potions and spells,” Erik says in a whisper, and Charles has to lean in to hear him over the croaking of the frogs in the bushes. “I think I can do magic.”

Charles’ breath catches in his throat.

“Can you move things without touching them, Erik?” he says softly, and the phrase sounds familiar on his tongue, from more than just that morning he’s sure, but he can’t place it.

“Not everything, but,” Erik takes a deep breath, and the necklace under Charles’ shirt starts thrumming against his chest, and as he leans back, it lifts out of his collar of it’s own accord. “Things that are made of metal just…I don’t know how, I’ve been doing it since I was just a boy.” With a slow twist of his fingers Erik makes the silver circle spin in front of Charles’ eyes, and Charles grins.

“Erik, you have a gift,” he says, “it’s beautiful.”

“A gift?”

The necklace drops and they meet each other’s eyes

“The spells, the plants,” Charles explains quickly, “All of that can be taught, like any other skill, if you’re willing to learn. But gifts like this, you have to be born with them.” He doesn’t try to hide the raw wonder from his face, and he sees it mirrored back at him in Erik’s. “I’ve never known anyone to have them, besides me and Raven.”

“You can…you can do this?” Erik asks, and the necklace gives another soft shudder.

“Not that, exactly. You have your tricks and I have mine, you know. Raven’s is shape-shifting, it’s quite brilliant, actually.”

“What is your gift, Charles?” Erik says softly, in sharp contrast to the intensity leaking into the air around him. Charles takes a shaky breath.

“I can read minds,” he says slowly, “among other things.” Erik’s eyes widen and his lips part a little. Charles says quickly, “I don’t use it much, telepathy can get a little…messy.”

_Do you know what I’m thinking?_ He hears, and after days closed off from his powers it sounds like it’s shouted in his ear.

“If you think it very loudly like that, yes,” Charles says out loud, “I can’t help but hear it. If I wasn’t closing myself off from it, I could hear much more.”

_Do you know that I want-_ Erik starts to think, before shutting the thought out, or putting it somewhere Charles can’t hear.

“Want what?” Charles presses, but Erik shakes his head.

“Nothing. It’s silly.” He shifts a little closer to Charles. “Can you help someone remember something? If they’ve forgotten?”

Charles nods carefully.

“I could, yes. But I told you Erik, I don’t really –“

“Just one thing,” Erik says softly, “I just want to see one thing.”

Charles should say no, he should. He said no powers, and he meant that.

“What do you want to see?”

Erik blinks fast and swallows hard.

“My mother,” he says quickly, “died when I was a kid. And I can’t – I can’t quite remember what she looks like.”

If Charles had any doubts left, he certainly can’t listen to them now, can’t deny Erik this.

“Of course,” he whispers, “of course I’ll help you see her.”

Charles’ fingers fit against his temple perfectly as if he never stopped putting them there, and he watches Erik close his eyes before closing his own.

Erik’s mind isn’t shielded exactly – he’s of course never been trained to do such a thing – but there’s a tightness to it. Charles treads carefully, but he has to wind through layers of Erik’s mind before he reaches his memories, layers of pain and anger, and further down longing, to be good and do good and for what is right. It wells up in Charles and for a moment he thinks it will overtake him, but it passes.

Erik’s memory system looks much like the night sky, solid spaces of darkness interrupted by a scattering of light, brighter in some places than in others. Charles spots the biggest, brightest swath of lights and unravels it as best he can, and gets a woman’s face almost immediately.

She’s smiling, always, showing in her mouth and the wrinkles around her eyes, and she has dark eyes and Erik’s nose.

“That’s her,” Erik mumbles, and Charles didn’t need him to say it to know. He opens his eyes and is caught between being endlessly grateful he has and wishing he’d kept them closed.

Erik’s face is tragic, there’s no other word for it, caught in a moment between sadness and longing and gratitude. Seeing him like this feels like a violation, far more intimate than seeing his memories. Charles can’t look away.

He lets the image hang between their minds a while longer before he lets it fade, and when Erik opens his eyes, wet and full and threatening to spill over, Charles says, “That was beautiful, Erik, thank you,” and thumbs away a tear of his own.

“Your gift,” Erik says roughly after a moment, “You can do so much.” Charles gives him a wry smile.

“It comes with a price.”

Erik’s eyes still on him, soft.

“I’ll bet it does.”

They’re sitting very close again – Charles doesn’t try for it, he swears, but it seems they’re forever invading each other’s space – and Erik leans a little closer still.

Charles thinks, for the second time, that Erik is going to make some kind of intentions clear, is going to lean in just a bit further and kiss him, and for the second time Charles can admit to himself he’s hoping for it. He’s sure it’s going to happen, in fact, but a frog jumps between them, onto Erik’s knee, at the last moment.

“I have no idea where these things came from,” Charles mutters, and just manages to pick up something vague from Erik’s thoughts about witches and toads before the creature starts making a horrible hacking sound.

“I think it has something caught in its throat,” Erik says, and they both watch it in a horrid fascination as it coughs – if a frog can do such a thing – until it spits something out, small and shiny.

Erik picks it up and holds it near one of the candles to examine it, and all at once Charles can feel the hazy link left between their minds severed. When Erik turns to him his face is stone cold and empty.

“What is this.”

“I don’t know,” Charles says, furrowing his eyebrows, “Let me see it.”

Erik thrusts the thing in his face, almost too close for Charles to see, but he makes out that is a ring. A big sturdy thing, some kind of tarnished silver metal, with the letters, “Az,” carved into the front. Charles’ heart squeezes and drops. It’s the same letters branded into the dead girl’s skin in Erik’s crime scene photos.

“I’ve never seen this in my life, Erik,” he says honestly, “you have to believe that.”

But Erik’s already stood up and is stalking away across the yard, the floating candles falling as he goes without Charles really meaning for them to.

“You better get a damned good lawyer,” he says over his shoulder, and his voice is sharp and cold.

****  


Raven finds Charles sitting in the kitchen when she wakes up, just after eleven, eyes rimmed red, hands balled in tired fists on the tabletop.

“Charles? What…what are you doing?” She glances around. “What happened with Erik? Have you – have you been awake all night?”

Charles stares straight ahead.

“He’s not leaving,” he says flatly. Raven looks around again.

“What? Charles, what are you talking about?”

“He’s been knocking on the window all night,” Charles says, glancing towards the kitchen window and immediately turning away. He’d thought maybe if he talked about it would somehow stop being true, but just outside the windowpane is Azazel, clear as day, grinning at him from behind the glass. “He won’t leave me alone, Raven, I can’t do this.”

“Who won’t leave you alone?”

Charles stands up hard and fast, and his chair clatters to the floor.

“The guy we have buried under our rose bushes,” he says, nearly yelling, pointing, even though he knows Raven won’t see him. “I hear him, in the house at night, I see him every time I look outside, and his – his things keep on turning up all over.”

“What things?” Raven says carefully, peering out the window on the empty yard.

“Well I know I didn’t put his car keys on the counter, I don’t suppose you did?” Charles shouts. “No? Huh, funny. Not to mention the _ring_ one of the three thousand frogs that suddenly appeared in our yard coughed up last night, conveniently into _Erik’s hand_.” Raven only looks dumbfounded for a moment, but then Charles has always envied her resilience.

“It isn’t that bad, look, I could have…I could have accidentally brought the ring back with my things, right?” She nods to herself. “We’ll just stick to our story. No body, no crime, it’ll be -”

“It’s not going to be fine, Raven,” Charles cuts in, running his fingers through his hair as he paces the kitchen. “I can’t – I can’t do this anymore. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the wake of your mess.”

“My mess?” Raven yells back at him, “I didn’t kill the guy.”

Charles stops pacing and looks at her, and his eyes are little wild around the edges.

“Oh that’s rich, Raven,” he says, “really. This was another one of _your_ messes, and I was trying to help you out of it.”

“Yeah, okay, because your life is perfect, and mine is a one giant _mess_ ,” Raven spits at him, and turns toward the stairs. On the first landing she spins back around and jabs her finger at him. “At least I’ve _lived_ my life. You don’t get to be angry about it just because that thought scares the hell out of you.”

“I’m not scared of living my life,” Charles argues, and even he can hear the petulant note in his voice, “we just don’t want the same things.” Raven laughs.

“Yeah well, you’re right about that,” she says shrilly, “if I had even half the talent…the power…you have, I wouldn’t want to waste it living here.”

Charles grinds his teeth against each other and looks away, his body rocking, swaying, itching to move, his legs dying to take him somewhere.  He knows where.

Pulling his sweater off the rack by the cabinets he stalks toward the door, and Raven rushes down the stairs.

“What – What are you doing?” she demands, “Where are you going?”

“I’m doing the right thing.”

Raven stops him with a hand around his arms and tugs him back to face her.

“No,” she says, and tries to make it firm, inarguable, but there’s desperation in her voice. “No, no, no. You are not going to go tell him what really happened.”

Charles breaks out of her grip.

“You know, it’s funny,” he says without humor, “because the moment that man walked into this house that’s _all_ I seem to want to do.”

The door swings open with Charles only just touching it, and Raven tries to push it closed again.

“What are you going to do,” she reasons, “get on your knees and beg for mercy? Come on, Charles.”

“You want to see me not being scared?” he asks, and it hadn’t been windy before but now heavy gusts won’t let Raven push the door more than inch. Charles walks out. “Then watch this.”

****  


Charles believes in luck and fate both, but he isn’t sure which, if either, is responsible for the fact that he runs into Erik almost the moment he gets into town, running up behind him on the sidewalk.

“It was Azazel’s ring,” he says right off, before anything else, and already the pressure in his chest feels lighter.

Erik turns to him, and Charles still can’t read anything in his face, doesn’t dare touch his mind.

“Oh really?”

“I know you knew that,” Charles says, catching his breath, “but I needed to tell you anyway.”

Erik starts walking again, up to the motel on D street, and Charles follows.

“You should get a lawyer before you talk to me, Charles,” he warns, but there isn’t any heat in it anymore.

“I don’t want a lawyer.”

They come to room number 8 and Erik finally turns around again, looks at Charles long and hard, and sighs.“Alright, come on in.”

The motel room is small, painted green and white, and as long as Charles has lived in this town he’s never seen the inside of one of these rooms, never had a reason to.

There are papers strewn across the bed and the two-person table, photographs too, and Erik is sweeping them up quickly, muttering, “Sorry for the mess. I wasn’t exactly expecting company.”

Underneath a stack of pictures, when Erik takes them off the bed, Charles can see his letter to Raven, folded and creased and stained. He picks it up and rubs his fingers over the frail edges of where it’s been unfolded and folded again, marveling at the condition of it.

“How many times did you read this?” he says, holding it up, and Erik tries to look casual, shrugging out of his jacket.

“A few. I have to do a thorough study of all the evidence.”

He pulls out both chairs from the table and sets up a tape recorder in the middle of them, saying into, “Testimony of Charles Xavier, September 24th, 1998.” He looks at Charles, gestures towards the empty chair. “Go ahead, tell me what happened.” Charles doesn’t sit down. Suddenly this isn’t feeling like such a good idea.

“Raven didn’t kill anyone,” he says to start, before he thinks about it, “I want that to be clear.” Erik stares at him.

“Raven didn’t kill anyone,” he repeats slowly. “Raven didn’t…but you did?”

“I – I didn’t say that,” Charles stalls. Erik sighs again.

“Charles, do you know where Azazel is?”

Charles can’t seem to say anything but the truth, as usual around Erik, although he didn’t come here to lie.

“I think he’s in the spirit world.”

“You think he’s dead,” Erik says bluntly, and Charles shakes his head. He can’t keep his voice from shaking a little.

“No, I think he’s haunting us.” Charles looks back at the letter in his hands, and holds it up again. “What evidence, exactly, did you get from reading this letter?”

The tape recorder whirs in the background, and Erik glances at it before he speaks.

“Charles, you said Raven didn’t kill anyone. Did you? Did you kill Azazel?”

Charles bites his lip to keep from saying yes, even though he knows it would ease the tightness closing around his lungs if he did.

“What if I said yes?” he hedges, and Raven was right about him, wasn’t she? He’s scared. “Would you throw me in jail for the rest of my life?” He looks at Erik. “All because the world is short one man like Azazel?”

“That’s not for you or me to decide, how he should punished,” Erik says, rubbing his hands over his face.

“You don’t believe that,” Charles says, shaking his head. “You do this job because you want to do the right thing but you know, you _know_ , it’s not that easy, don’t you?” Erik stands up and shuts of the tape recorder with a quiet click.

“He has to be held accountable for his actions,” he says evenly, moving across the tiny room until Charles is backed up against the wall.

“He has been,” Charles swears, “He’s been punished.”

Erik stops.

“He has?”

Charles swallows hard and looks away.

“Charles, I want to help you,” Erik says, like he’s pleading with him. “If you tell me what you know I promise, I’ll do everything I can to keep you out of harm’s way.”

It’s more than Charles deserves certainly, and he looks at Erik with a wobbly smile.

“I know you will,” he says, “I saw, in your head, how good you want to be, how good you are.” He pauses, and the words turn around in his head as he thinks of them, like there’s somewhere he’s heard them before. “You have a good, kind heart, Erik, and you don’t even know it.

Erik kisses him, then, and Charles doesn’t even have a moment to see it coming, but he holds onto Erik’s wide shoulders and kisses Erik back like he’s wanted to since – since he doesn’t know when, maybe since he saw Erik on their doorstep.

But then…

“I can’t, I can’t,” he whispers, pushing Erik back, “ _We_ can’t.”

Erik braces his hands on either side of Charles’  head, against the wall, and closes his eyes.

“You’re right,” he says in a voice thick and throaty. “I’m sorry, of course.”

Charles is right, but he doesn’t feel like it, “We can’t” didn’t feel nearly as right in his mouth as Erik’s name does, and maybe, he dares to hope, some things are just meant to be.

He leans forward again and their lips meet and Erik doesn’t fight it. Erik is warm and sweet, and if he’s not especially gentle, well, Charles doesn’t need him to be.

His hands slide down the wall, around Charles’ waist and down his back, his fingers digging into Charles’ thighs as he lifts him up, turns them towards the bed. They bounce a little on the mattress, and Charles can barely remember to breath with Erik on top of him like this, with the way their lips slide, sticky and hot, against each other.

For a moment Erik pulls away, close enough that the tip of his nose still brushes Charles’ cheek, and at this distance his eyes are just a blur of green in front of–

Green?

“Your eyes are green,” Charles whispers, puzzling over it, and something about that feels important. He knows they were gray before, or maybe blue, but – Charles freezes. “Your eyes are green.”

He scrambles out from underneath Erik and rights himself.

“I’m sorry, I can’t-I have to go.”

He leaves Erik sitting on the bed, staring after him with his mouth hanging a little open. He doesn’t stop running until he gets back home.

“You knew,” he shouts at the bottom of the stairs, and he knows Raven is up there, knows she can hear him. His chest is heaving, only half from the running, and his voice is thick in his throat. “You knew the whole time, didn’t you?”

There aren’t tears falling down his cheeks when he slams through the pantry door, but they’re welling up in his eyes, blurring his vision as he searches. Books fall to the floor as he pushes them aside, tumbling from the shelves in clouds of dust and thudding to the floor. He finds it behind the book Raven left on the table the other night, a tiny, child-sized notebook filled with clumsy, child-sized writing. Some of the pages tear as he flips through them furiously, stopping abruptly in the middle.

“Amas Veritas,” he whispers to himself, a tear finally falling on the page, smudging the pencil a little. When he looks up Raven is there, in the doorway, and her eyes are sad.

“True Love,” she says softly, and a ragged breath is torn out of Charles’ chest. “Charles, I’m sorry.”

He sinks to the floor with the book clutched in his hands, and through his blurring vision reads what he’d written there almost twenty years ago.

“A man,” he croaks, “who is very strong, and has a heart that is good and kind, but doesn’t know it.” Raven drops the floor beside him among the fallen books, leaning against the wall. “He’s very handsome,” Charles reads, “And sometimes his eyes are blue, and sometimes they’re gray-“ his voice breaks. He buries his face in his hands and Raven puts a soft hand on his shoulders as they shake.

“I’m an idiot,” he whispers, leaning his head back against the wall. “Thinking I could stop myself from falling in love.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” Raven offers, but even her voice sounds flimsy. “Do you love him?” Charles shrugs.

“I know that I could.” He sighs, and slides his eyes over to her. “You knew, didn’t you, the whole time? That’s why you invited him to stay for breakfast, and asked him about the moving things, and the thing with the candles, and-“ he stops, and a faint laugh bubbles out of his chest. “It’s part of the spell. You knew why I couldn’t lie to him.”

“Not the whole time,” Raven protests, “I had ulterior motives for breakfast.” Charles cocks an eyebrow, and her smile looks at least a little guilty. “I put a banishing spell in the syrup.” She glances at the book in his hands and her voice gets softer. “I found that when I was putting the spellbook away. Fell open to that page, like fate.” Charles lets out a huff of breath.

“Yes, well, some fate that turned out to be.”

The doorbell interrupts whatever Raven would have said next, and instead she tenses a little and says, “Do you think it’s him?” and Charles shakes his head.

“Not after how I left, it isn’t.”

She gets to her feet and holds a hand to help Charles up.

“Well I’ll go see who it is,” she says, “How about you go upstairs and get some sleep?”

Before she mentioned it Charles had forgotten he hadn’t slept at all the night before, and the exhaustion hits him all at once. He doesn’t bother trying to listen, telepathically or otherwise, to find out who their visitor is, but when he gets to his bedroom door he stops, and listens for something.

Almost too quiet to catch, it’s there: the scuffling of boots on his bedroom floor. The rosemary from the night before is still in the kitchen, sitting useless on the table. Charles opens the door.

Azazel is there like dust in the sun from the window, flickering in the light and disappearing in the shadows. Charles and the apparition stare at each other for a moment. He’s never seen it this clearly before.

Charles lunges towards the table by his bed – he’s got a few loose pieces of chalk in there, he’s sure, and with chalk he can start a spell to hold the spirit off at least – but before he can make it across the room the apparition cuts him off, moving impossibly fast.

Just as his corpse had done with Raven, the ghost wraps its fingers around Charles’ neck, sending a shiver under Charles’ skin as they go right through him, clenching a fist around his throat from the inside. To say that Charles can’t breathe would be an understatement.

“Didn’t do such a good job bringing me back, did you Charles?” it says in a low, thick accent. “Getting a little…rusty, I think.”

There’s a clattering from the stairs and Raven appears in the doorway, freezing at the sight of the spirit, Erik just behind her.

Erik pulls out his gun, ready to fire, before he sees Azazel’s fist caught _inside_ Charles’ neck and stops cold. It’s a only a moment’s hesitation, but it’s all the spirit needs to shove Charles, reeling, across the room, and advance on Erik instead.

“Why Sheriff, just looking at you makes me homesick,” it says, and shoves it’s hands through Erik’s chest. Erik begins to double over, gasping, but then a hissing sound has the spirit pulling back abruptly, clutching its hand where a star-shaped welt has burnt through his palm.

“Your badge, Erik,” Raven says, and he fumbles it out of his jacket. He’s still trying to get it open when the spirit shoves him, knocking the badge out of his hand and kicking it across the floor.

It goes for Erik again but Charles tugs his pendent from around his neck, his own star, and shouts, “Erik!” as he tosses it across the room. For a moment it seems he might not catch it in time, but the spirit pauses a moment to see what Charles has sent flying through the air towards them, and Erik hooks the necklace around his fingers.

As the ghost turns back Erik presses the star into its forehead, and it melts with an echoed scream into smoke.

“That was him, wasn’t it?” Erik asks as Charles walks him out, and they stand at the edge of the porch, overlooking the yard. “Is he gone now?”

Charles leans on the railing and hangs his head.

“I think you killed the spirit, yes, but – I killed _him_. And I’ll tell you everything you need to know, how I did, where I buried him, how I –“

“Hang on,” Erik cuts him off, “hold on a second, look, I – I came here to bring in the bad guy, because normally, that’s what I do, but –“ He stops, and paces away from Charles for a moment, a hand rubbing at the crease in his forehead. “As far as I can tell,” he picks back up, “the real bad guy, the one I came here looking for, just got…incinerated, or something…up there, and I don’t know how to explain any of this.”

He comes back to stand in front of Charles, meeting his eyes. “You asked me how many times I read your letter,” he says, admits, “I must have read it about a thousand times, and I wasn’t joking when I said that’s what brought me here.”

Charles takes a deep breath.

“Actually, I brought you here,” he says quietly, turning his eyes to his feet. He sighs, and looks back up, willing his voice to stay steady. “When I was a little boy I did a spell, I…I never wanted to fall in love, so I asked for a person I knew – I _thought_ – couldn’t possibly exist, but –“

“But I do,” Erik finishes for him, and looks a little lost in it all. Charles nods.

“But you do.”

Erik laughs, and when Charles looks up he says, “You thought it was impossible for a person to have green eyes?” and Charles laughs a little too, in spite of himself.

“I asked for someone with eyes that were sometimes gray, sometimes green, and sometimes blue,” he says, and Erik nods, face sobering.

“So what I’m –“ he starts, and clears his throat. “What I’m…feeling. It’s all just, one of your spells?”

Charles bites his lip and nods, looks away.

“It’s not real,” he says, although the words stick in his throat, “and even if you…stayed, or– I’d never know if it was because of a spell, and you’d never know if I just really didn’t want to go to prison.”

Erik’s jaw gets tight and Charles thinks for a moment that he isn’t going to let it go that easily, but then he says, “Well, I have some things I need to do, and I’m guessing you do too.” He glances back at the house. “So let’s just…see where we end up.”

He’s stepping off the porch, and Charles tries to smile, to agree, but he can’t get the words out. This is going to be the last time he sees Erik, he’s certain of it, and that’s really for the best. Erik stops by the gate.

“I don’t believe in curses, Charles,” he says, apropos of nothing, but Charles knows what he means. “And you know what? I wished for you too.”  

****  


In the house Raven is waiting for him by the bottom of the stairs, wraps him up in a hug when he gets close enough. Charles buries his face in her hair gratefully.

“I’m sorry I said all those things,” he says to her ear, “It isn’t your mess, I’m sorry.”

She pulls back and shrugs, her eyes a little too glossy.

“My mess,” she says, “your mess.” She claps their hands together, his right, her left, where they both have scars on their palms still, from the day she left. “Our mess.”

“You really think it’s over?” Charles asks, looking cautiously up the twists of the stairwell, as if Azazel might be leering down at him over the railing. Raven looks up with him.

“I think it is.”

They go up to the attic together, and they both pause outside Charles’ door.  His whole life Charles has been sleeping here, and he’s not about to let one ridiculous spirit ruin that, but tonight…tonight he’d rather not.

“You can sleep in my room, if you want,” Raven says before he can ask, and he hasn’t done that in years, since their father died, but he nods gratefully.

It’s warm enough in the house that they can sleep on top of the quilt, and even with the window closed Charles can still hear their plague of frogs croaking in the garden. It makes him uneasy – those frogs were a part of this, they had to be – but he supposes they weren’t just going to disappear over the course of a few hours.

They curl up on their sides, facing each other, just like they did when they were children, and when Charles closes his eyes he can feel Raven shift. Her finger comes up to tickle his nose, the way she’d always done to wake him up for school. Charles smiles.

“Charles?” she whispers, the sound settling into dark around them. “Do you think, maybe, I could still stay here, for awhile?” He opens his eyes.

“This is your home, Raven, you don’t have to ask me that.” She buries her smile into her pillow.

Charles wakes up in the night to hear only the sounds he should, the croaking of the frogs, and just underneath it, crickets. He’s wide awake.

“Raven,” he whispers, shaking her shoulder, “something is wrong.”

He drags her into the pantry still blurry eyed, both of them still in pajamas, and begins piling her arms with books and jars.

“We need a coven,” he mutters to himself, “that means at least three. I don’t suppose you’ve got any friends?” Raven just looks at him crossly. He sighs. “I didn’t really think so.”

 

They pull up to Moira’s house at half past one, and Charles bangs on the door until she yanks it open, looking caught between worry and slamming the door in his face.

“Charles? What are you doing here?”

He gives her a weak smile.

“You know all that stuff people are always saying about me, how I’m a witch and all that?”

She looks affronted, and opens her mouth a little, like she might deny it, and then squints at him.

“Yeah?”

He laughs a little, nervously.

“Well, it’s true! I’m a witch! And I could really use your help.”

 

Driving south down Interstate 5 at a not entirely legal speed, Raven slowly waking up in the passenger side, Moira pokes around in the back, cataloguing the supplies tossed across the seat.

“Are these…brooms?” she says, lifting her feet to get a better look at the floor. Charles glances at her in the rearview mirror.

“Yes,” he says, adding hastily, “Not for flying, or anything silly like that.”

“Charles, what’s going on?” she says, for the thousandth time.

“He won’t say,” Raven tells her, “Don’t bother asking, I’ve tried.”

“It isn’t that I _won’t_ say,” Charles says, frowning at her. “It’s that I _can’t_ , exactly.”

Moira looks around at the books and bottles of herbs again.

“This stuff looks very…specific,” she says, “for not knowing exactly what we’re doing.”

Charles grips the steering wheel a little tighter.

“Just trust me,” he says, with a note of pleading, and she lets it go.

 

 

Barely twenty minutes along the road they spot a car stopped in their lane, driver side door left hanging open. Charles takes in a sharp breath.

“That’s his car,” he says, leaving no room for uncertainty.

He pulls their car to a clumsy stop on the side of the road, only feet from the one blocking the way.

“Grab the things from the back,” he says quickly, not even looking back over his shoulder as he runs into the middle of the street.

Lying on the road, twisting and writhing against the asphalt in the spill of headlights from both cars, is Erik. A hand to his damp forehead tells that Erik is running a fever, his skin flushed and burning. Charles knows it’s much, much more than that.

“Hey, you could have helped us, you-” Raven shouts from the side of the road, stopping mid insult when she gets close enough to see what – who – Charles is kneeling over. “Oh my god.”

She and Moira dump the supplies next to Charles, and Raven comes around Erik’s other side to mirror Charles, kneeling by him. Moira hangs back.

“Is that – the sheriff?” she asks, taking slow, uncertain steps closer. “How did you know he would be here?”

“He needs our help,” Charles says instead of answering, pulling a spellbook from where it’s been dropped beside him, flipping through it with frantic fingers. “Here it is,” he whispers, and as he says it Erik’s eyes slide open. Gone are any of the colors Charles had dreamed about years before, replaced by a cold, cloudy yellow.

Charles trades a panicked look with Raven, and even as Erik begins to sit up they’re pushing him back to the ground.

“Moira, there’s chalk in that box, the blue one,” Charles says quickly, “I need you to draw a circle around us.”

The chalk spills out of the box when she opens it, but she gathers a piece from the ground and draws the circle with surprisingly steady hands.

“Now brick dust,” Charles grunts, straining to keep Erik down, even with Raven’s help. “Same box. Sprinkle it around the chalk lines.”

“Finished,” she says breathlessly when the circle is seamless, and Charles meets Raven’s eyes again, and nods.

They throw themselves backwards, out of the circle, and when Erik crawls to his knees to follow he’s stopped short at the circle’s edge.

“Why can’t he cross it?” Moira asks, hushed, as Charles wipes sweat from his forehead and scrambles to tie a bundle of sage together with twine.

“The brick dust,” Raven tells her. “Lay down a line of it, and no one who wishes you harm will be able to cross.”

Instead of looking appeased, Moira shakes her head and opens her mouth several times before she speaks.

“Why would the sheriff want to hurt you?”

Raven keeps her eyes trained on Erik, where he’s sitting in the middle of the circle, carefully. The brick dust is solid, but they don’t have room to take chances.

“He isn’t the sheriff anymore,” she says, soft, and Charles continues for her, not looking up as he strikes a match and sets the sage burning.

“He’s been possessed,” he says simply, and before Moira can ask. “The chalk line is for a ritual.” Moira starts.

“How did you know I was going to-“

Charles glances at Raven.

“Lucky guess.”

The ritual circle needs a number of symbols around it before it will work, and when Charles is done the chalk is just a tiny nub in his hand, and he scrapes his fingers raw against the pavement with each stroke.

Without a word, Raven lights the candles, five of them, and positions them around the circle in a star.

They stand around Erik in a triangle, holding their brooms aloft with the handles crossing. Three brooms for a coven of three, although one of them has a bright blue plastic handle and green bristles.

Charles closes his eyes, and says in a low, even voice, “Dii te perdant, te maledico.”

Moira leans over to Raven and whispers, “Are we supposed to be saying it too?”

Raven shrugs, and repeats it, her tongue a little clumsier than Charles’, “Dii te perdant, te maledico.”

After listening a few times Moira repeats it too, sorting out all the right letters in her mouth. Louder and louder they chant it together as Erik falls to his back in the circle and his body jerks.

  _“Dii te perdant, te maledico_

_dii te perdant, te maledico.”_

The louder they chant the louder the spirit gets, wailing and moaning through its own voice and Erik’s both. Erik’s body convulses and twists and his breathing starts to come in slow, rasping gasp, and Charles drops his broom.

“Stop, stop, we’re killing him.” He drops to his knees. “Keep the brooms in a circle.” Brooms, chalk, brick dust and all, he crawls into the circle, reaching for the bundle of sage and brushing the ash against Erik’s forehead.

The spirit’s yellow eyes close, and when they open they’re Erik’s eyes, distant and glassy.

“Charles?”

It’s all Charles can do not to cry in relief; it isn’t over yet.

“I’m here, Erik,” Charles assures him, smoothing sweaty locks of hair away from Erik’s forehead. “You have to fight it.”

Erik shakes his head, his eyes fixed on the sky above them.

“I can’t, it’s too –“ he stops as pain twists through his chest. “It’s too strong.”

Charles worries his lip between his teeth and looks up at Raven where she stands outside the circle.

“This is my fault,” he says, and she’s shaking her head before he even suggests it. “I killed him, I’m the reason Erik was dragged into this –“ Charles takes a deep breath. “I have to let it take me instead.”

“No, you’re not doing this,” Raven says, getting to her knees between two of the candles, as close as she can to Charles. “You’re not allowed to die on me, Charles.” There are tears gathering her eyes, and Charles already has them wet on his eyelashes. “We’re supposed to die together, remember?” she says, “On the same day. And today is not that day.”

Charles looks back at Erik to see his eyes changing slowly this time, clouding over before the color fades. They don’t have a lot of time.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he says, stray tears running down his face and dripping from his chin, onto the ground. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Raven looks down, tracing the scar crossing her left hand on the inside.

“Blood magic,” she says, and looks back up to Charles. “It’s kept us linked all these years. It lead you right to me when I needed you.”

Charles looks at his own hands, and back at Raven. This kind of magic is made to last lifetimes, and she knows it. He nods.

Sitting close in the curve of Erik’s side Charles picks up his hand. He tilts his head to watch Charles, his eyes still his own, if only just, and he smiles weakly. It isn’t a smile Charles has gotten to see much of, too wide and with too many teeth, even now, and it’s one Charles wants to see a thousand more times.

“I guess this is where we end up,” Erik says roughly, and Charles shakes his head.

“I’m not letting you die, Erik.”

Into the circle Raven tosses her pocketknife, and when Charles catches it, sends her a glance, she nods. “The same one.”

The blade flickers in the headlights when Charles flips it out, and he can hear the telltale rattle in Erik’s chest that says he’s about to be overtaken again.

“You have to believe in it,” Charles tells him, clear and urgent. “It won’t work if you don’t believe. Can you do that?”

Erik’s nod is cut off as he tenses, resisting the spirit’s pull.

“I believe in you, Charles.”

The blade slides easily across Charles’ palm, leaving a clean stream of blood in its wake. Erik laughs, and it’s not his own. He flicks yellowed eyes back and forth wildly, but Charles pins his wrist to the ground and slices across his hand anyway.

Their blood runs together, hot and sticky, and Charles presses their cuts together, his left hand on Erik’s right; it can’t be too late, it can’t.

“You have to help him fight it,” Raven calls to him, “from the inside. You have to use your power.”

And that’s what got them into this mess in the first place, and Charles looks at her with wild eyes.

“You have to believe in it too,” Raven insists. “You have to believe in your own power.”

Charles turns back to Erik and closes his eyes, forcing the panic in his own mind to ease before he lets the floodgates open.

He sinks into Erik’s mind easily, but the split inside between the man and the spirit possessing him almost knocks him out again.

_You can fight him_ , Charles thinks desperately, _you are the better man, Erik_. He doesn’t know if Erik can hear him at all, if he’s too preoccupied pushing the intrusion from his head. The fight is all fury, Charles can feel the rage as Erik pushes with all his might, can feel the anger fraying Erik at the edges, wearing him down.

_You are strong enough_ , Charles thinks at him, and this time he keeps himself calm, serene. He can sense as something in Erik’s mind stills in response, as it braces against the spirit, and then Charles is forced back into his own mind alone.

He opens his eyes to a light glowing from Erik’s chest, cresting until it’s too bright too look at, blinding them. In comparison the car headlights are almost to dim to see by when the light fades, but when Charles adjusts to it Erik is looking back at him, eyes a clear, clean gray.

Charles laughs, collapsing to the ground, blood smearing across his skin as their hands slide apart. He could fall asleep here he’s so tired, he thinks, next to Erik in the middle of Interstate 5.

Charles leans into Erik’s window when they’ve pulled themselves to their feet and gotten back to their cars, when it’s all over. He’s got an apology on his lips, one that will never be enough, but something in Erik’s face quiets him. He can feel Raven and Moira watching him from their own car.

“I guess this isn’t where we end up after all,” he says, and shifts on his feet.

“It’s really over this time,” Erik says, and Charles nods, even though it hadn’t been a question. “So I guess…”

“I guess we’ll see,” Charles finishes, and smiles. He can’t see Erik’s face much for the darkness around them, can’t see his expression. Charles wants to lean in and kiss him one last time, before he leaves. He wouldn’t blame Erik for wanting to put this place in his rearview mirror for good.

Instead Charles shuffles backwards and gives a little wave.

“Well, until then,” he says softly, and he thinks Erik smiles.

“Until then, Charles.”

****  
  


The frogs have all disappeared from the garden, and Charles spends the next two weeks carefully tending to the plants he’d neglected since Raven had come home. She helps out, kneeling next to him in the dirt with a surprising good nature for how much she’d hated it when they were younger.

She brings him a letter one day, from the mailbox, and gives him a sly smile.

“Something came for you,” she says cheerfully, “from Arizona.”

Charles pulls off his gloves and rips the envelope open, pulling out the letter inside and reading aloud.

“Dear Mr. Xavier,” he starts, skimming across to the important parts. “Any further investigations…office hereby concluded…cause of death was accidental. Personal artifacts found in the ashes provided positive identification…Sincerely, Erik Lehnsherr, Tucson County Sheriff’s Office.”

Out of the envelope falls something small and shining, and Charles scoops it up from the ground to examine it.

It’s Azazel’s ring, no doubt the personal artifacts in question, and he hands it to Raven to inspect. She tosses it into their trash bin full of weeds.

Charles slides his hand back into the envelope, feeling around to make sure there’s nothing he missed, and Raven laughs.

“I don’t think he’s in there, Charles.”

Charles flushes a little, and shrugs.

“Anything’s possible.”

****  


Later in the evening Raven comes bursting into his bedroom, nearly knocking his vase of rosemary from where it stands on his dresser, with a spellbook in her hands.

“Charles look at this,” she demands, jumping onto his bed, and he glances at the page she has open. The top reads, _Amas Veritas_.

“Raven what are you doing with that,” he says, alarmed, “haven’t we learned-“

“Be quiet for a second and listen,” she interrupts, and starts to read.

_“Not to be confused with spell in chapter 4,_ Amas Veritas _is little more than a summoning spell, ensuring the caster will one day find their true love, assuming such a person already exists. The spell may take any number of years to produce an effect, largely dependent on the ages and distance between the caster and the subject.”_

Raven slams the book closed when she finishes and looks at Charles expectantly.

“Do you know what that means?” she prods when he doesn’t say anything. “That means the spell didn’t make Erik feel anything for you at all, it just brought him here.”

Charles considers for a moment before pulling the book into his lap and flipping to the right page, reading over it himself.

“What would you do, Raven?” he asks when he’s finished, helplessly. Raven gives him an easy smile.

“What wouldn’t I do, for true love?”

So Charles tears the page out of the carefully kept spellbook, because he isn’t going to need it anymore, and folds it into an envelope addressed to Tucson, Arizona, and goes back to his garden.

They’re eating breakfast the morning of Halloween when the broom falls from the corner, and Charles and Raven look at it before meeting each other’s eyes.

“Broom fell,” Raven says with a smirk. Charles grins back at her.

“Company’s coming.”

 

When Charles answers the door he says “Hello Erik,” nice and easy, and Erik starts.

“You could have pretended to be surprised, at least,” he grumbles.

“No one else would dare come near this house on today of all days,” Charles says with a shrug and a smile. Leaning against the doorway, he asks lazily, “So what brings you here, Sheriff?”

Erik reaches into his jacket and pulls out his envelope.

“That’s one of my letters,” Charles says, and Erik returns his grin.

“It is.” After a second he leans in, as if to share a secret. “Word is, around here, you can tell me my fortune.” He says, and offers Charles his right hand. Charles takes it.

“Hmmm,” he says solemnly, tracing lines on Erik’s palm at random. “I can see here, in your future, a big house on the edge of town, with a nice, spacious bedroom already made up for you, and it’s a place where you’ll learn a few things.”

“Learn what kind of things?” Erik asks, humoring him, as he lifts his eyebrows.

“You know, always grow rosemary by the front gate,” Charles says absently, “plant lavender for luck, throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Among some…other things.”

He traces the scar that crosses Erik’s palm and says, “I can see here you’re looking for true love.” He looks up at Erik again. “And I can see right here, you’ve found it.”

“You can see that where?” Erik teases, and Charles rolls his eyes.

“Right here,’ he says, tapping the corner of his mouth with his finger. Erik smiles, wide, with all those teeth, and it’s even better than Charles remembers.

“Ah, right there,” he says, and leans in to give the spot a kiss.


End file.
